Neutral Zone Analysis

How repeatable is performance in the Offensive, Defensive and Neutral Zones?

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A few years back, Eric Tulsky (and others at Broad Street Hockey) pioneered the start of neutral zone tracking, or rather the tracking by individuals of every entry each team makes from the neutral zone into the offensive zone during a hockey game.  The idea of this tracking was simple:  Neutral Zone play is obviously important to winning a hockey game, but NHL-tracked statistics contain practically no way to measure neutral zone success overall.   Zone Entry tracking remedied that, by giving us both individual and on-ice measures of neutral zone performance.

An overall measure of neutral zone performance that we can find with zone entry tracking is called “Neutral Zone Fenwick.”  By using the average amount of Fenwick events resulting from each type of zone entry (Carry-in or Dump-in), we can create an estimate of what we’d expect a player’s Fenwick % to be with them on the ice based on the team’s neutral zone play with them on the ice.  In essence, this is a measure of a player’s neutral zone performance, helpfully done in a format that we’re already pretty familiar with – like normal Fenwick%, 50%=break even, above 50% = good, below = bad.

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An Introduction to Analyzing Neutral Zone Data (with Graphs)

garik16 Neutral Zone Analysis 3 Comments

Goons like Eric Boulton tend to break Graphs featuring Neutral Zone Data in very……..not-good ways.

A little over 2 years ago, Eric T. introduced us to the idea of tracking play in the neutral zone, in the form of tracking “Zone Entries.”   Zone Entry Tracking is now being done by trackers for a few different teams (Isles, Canes, Ducks, Kings, Sharks, Flyers, Caps, and more here and there) although not most teams’ data has not been collected yet such that people can compare players across teams.

That’s something I’d like to change, so I will be using this space to acquire data from various teams and compare teams and players.  That said, I’d like to explain how we analyze neutral zone data in the first place.

Most Neutral Zone trackers track using a spreadsheet created by Eric, which collects the time, player, and type of each entry.  That sheet compiles the 5 on 5 and 5 on 5 close individual #s of each player (How many entries, What % of entries were via carry, how many shots per type of entry, etc.) and the team.

Using a tool created by Red Line Station (@Muneebalummcu) and with some help from Eric T, we can then use this data to get on-ice data for every player.  This is to me, the real gold mine of neutral zone data – we can see not just how often a player carries in, but how often the opponents do so against him, and whether opponents are carrying it in or instead dumping.   We can also use this data to determine which players aren’t getting it done once the puck is in the offensive or defensive zones, although how repeatable that data is is still in question (More on this in a bit)

There are a few neutral zone stats I think are most worth highlighting: Continue reading →